The TAB – mobile testing

The TAB is OCC’s Technical Advisory Board, made up of representatives from OCC’s project and product groups. The TAB’s role includes reviewing technology developments and their impact on the company’s software development.

Test your production code

Things can go wrong between debug and release builds:

conditional compilation

linking

incorrect project configuration/build dependencies

This means we need to test the production build. However, this is not always as simple as it sounds. Apple makes it almost impossible to test release builds due to the effort involved in arranging provisioning profiles and signing certificates.

How can we make this easier? Read on.

Beta programmes

All the app stores provide beta programmes, offering a way of (relatively) simply deploying apps to a group of users for testing.

Google

alpha channel for early builds

beta channel for more stable builds

choose from invite-only testing or open to anyone

you can set a maximum number of testers and testers will then be able to access the app on a first-come-first-served basis

you can roll out updates to a certain percentage of your testers and increase that percentage once you’re happy the update is stable

Apple

Test Flight internal: available only to accounts linked to the developer’s company